Now the books of prophecy
are lost, and the great sequences
that were to replace them
have been left to us as fragments:
you were the only one
to find a few myths still entire
or consider the possibility
of angels, along with all
that they carry with them,
as I never could.

2

Perhaps you meant to go on
to enter the ramshackle houses
that the dead inhabit
and sit for a while among those
who sent back no word
of the wreckage of their bodies,
the glassy outline of wings.